ABSTRACT
Deep in the heart of the Pioneer Valley in Western Massachusetts,3 about an hour or so away from the hustle and bustle of Northeast metropolises like New York, Boston, Providence, and Hartford, New WORLD Theater would become, at the turn of the twenty-first century, a significant New England hub for artists and playwrights of color. A multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and multi-generational enterprise, New WORLD Theater (originally called Third World Theater) was founded in fall 1979 as a company-in-residence within the Fine Arts Center at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Faced with budget cuts, institutional non-support, and the university’s increased “austerity” measures, the company would-despite public outcry and protest-inauspiciously close in 2009.4
Notwithstanding these contestations, over the course of its thirty-year run-and ironically, given its geographic location-New WORLD Theater was an incontrovertible artistic and epistemological pioneer. Envisioned by founding artistic director Roberta Uno as an anti-racist creative refuge, cutting-edge performance venue, and innovative playlab, New WORLD Theater was ahead of its time with regard to its attention to divergent viewpoints. The company was likewise prescient, via its imaginings of future aesthetics and changing demographics and its activist stance against interlocking modes of discrimination (race, gender, class,
and sexuality). Perhaps most important, New WORLD Theater was at the intellectual forefront of Ethnic Studies vis-à-vis its consistent critique of mainstream multiculturalism.
